Mike Parker, Chairman of SeSaME, writes…
I SPENT Monday morning trying to negotiate what is usually a routine task as Manager of SeSaME community oil buying club, checking suppliers receipt of our 32,000 litres tender of heating oil for 50 members. Not a day to forget. Five out of six Suppliers wouldn’t offer a bid, uncertain about supply, price and delivery times.
It luckily ended with one loyal supplier accepting our order on the basis. “We will accept the orders but are unable to confirm a final delivery date or price. The price will be set on the day of delivery, and heating oil prices are currently nearing £1 litre. Its possible they will increase further in the next few weeks delivery time”
Understandably they left me relieved, but I had the unenviable task of telling a computer free pensioner I submit order requests for – his 1000 litres were likely to cost him £1000 or possibly more – and at a time that I could not be certain of. He very reluctantly accepted. “At £1500 I would need to have my oil,” he said.
The potent cocktail of oil and gas supply as a weapon of choice for Russia’s genocidal activities is now clearly shown to be linked to the social devastation global warming is already inflicting on significant parts of the globe.
This time the need for drastic action against the effects of wanton fossil fuel exploitation can’t be avoided – especially for rural communities. Quick effective action needs a national consensus led government, like Churchill’s 1940 Cabinet. Only pragmatic, informed, long term consensus planning will succeed. Achieving sustainable housing refits for insulation and heating countrywide, enforcing planning laws that ensure new buildings have zero carbon standards, encouraging onshore wind, revolutionising transport and boosting local supply chains, will be a major decade long task.
Ideas whose feasibility used to be considered too difficult, just pie in the sky, are clearly economic necessities. We will, in the words of the Bard, be strange bedfellows, if the misery of Putin delivering death from the skies accelerates more effective rejection of our fossil fuel economy.
